Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founders Field Guide. Founders Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:56)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:21)
My guest today is Leore Avidar. Leore is the co-founder and CEO of Lob, a company which makes it easy to send direct mail programmatically. He's also the founder of a new company focusing on sports card collectibles, Alt, which is how we originally connected. Our conversation ranges from building Lob, buying a Lebron James rookie card, starting a second business while operating his first and how Leore tries to create and sell superpowers.
Like my conversation with Rahul Vohra from Superhuman, I think this conversation will inspire entrepreneurs out there to start building aggressively. Please enjoy. So Leore, I've been looking forward to this one for a long time. We share a lot of common passions and interests. We're going to go all over the place touching on entrepreneurship, the companies you've been building, technology, programming, the whole nine baseball cards, collectibles. It's going to be a great conversation.
Welcome to the show, and I think the best place to start would be the origin story of Lob and its mission, which I find its mission in particular to be quite fascinating that we could probably talk about for an hour.

**Leore Avidar** (3:22)
Yeah, excited to dive in on everything.
So yeah, the journey to start Lob is actually a long one. When I grew up, my dream job was to combine engineering and business to create this machine that would just trade all day long so that I could go and travel the world.
So I started my career on Wall Street. And I remember when I was at the desk at Citigroup, utilizing my engineering skills to be very transformative and progressive. And everyone kind of just kept telling me to just keep doing what I was supposed to be doing. I've always played around with a lot of new technologies, came around to this service called Amazon Web Services in 2010-2011, and I just fell in love with it.
I ended up going to work there. And I remember when I got there, I was like, wow, I'm in the business of selling superpowers to developers. This is going to be such a big thing in the future. Developers are finally going to be a front office of a company, as opposed to what was considered back office or IT.